


Ice Cream Night

by InkSkratches



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 06:43:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSkratches/pseuds/InkSkratches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you…askin’ me to provide you with ice cream?”</p>
<p>“Did I stutter? I’m asking you to take a trip to the supermarket, say hi to our good friends Ben and Jerry, and ask if they might not fork over a dozen pints of the fattest and most lawfully wedded son of a bitch they’ve got on hand.”</p>
<p>“You gotta reign in the metaphors, Kar, you’re losin’ me.”</p>
<p>“Store. Chubby Hubby. Twelve pints. My house. Now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice Cream Night

**Author's Note:**

> Originally done as a Secret Santa gift on [Tumblr](http://inkskratches.tumblr.com/post/40139588217/ice-cream-night).

You had called him to ask how his day was.

His reply is brief. “Put me in the fucking microwave.”

It used to be a lot longer. The first time he’d initiated the event, there had been more of the artful buildup you were used to from Karkat Vantas. “I want to stuff myself so full of frozen dairy that every inch of me swells up with it. I’ll be so packed with milky saccharine, I will physically transmogrify into some giant fucking confection. Like a Peep. I will become a yellow, sugary testament to springtime holiday cheer, and I will just balloon out like you’d taken my quivering mallow form and shoved it in the microwave. I want you to set that bastard on high and let it run until I am filling up the whole goddamned inside with every inch of my Stay-Puft body. And a single tear will roll down my swollen beak, and it’ll taste like the fucking Chubby Hubby leaking out of my every pore.”

You had squinted. Because even if he couldn’t see it through the phone, it was necessary in making your voice reach just the appropriate level of scathing incredulity. “Are you…askin’ me to provide you with ice cream?”

“Did I stutter? I’m asking you to take a trip to the supermarket, say hi to our good friends Ben and Jerry, and ask if they might not fork over a dozen pints of the fattest and most lawfully wedded son of a bitch they’ve got on hand.”

“You gotta reign in the metaphors, Kar, you’re losin’ me.”

“Store. Chubby Hubby. Twelve pints. My house. Now.”

Thus began the time honored tradition that is Ice Cream Night.

And so you go. Because even though it’s a snowy evening in January and your car’s brakes are on their last quivering legs and the supermarket is over a bridge that’s nearly always iced over, you put on your scarf and earmuffs and start up the engine anyway. Because you are a man of honor and dependability, and you put a lot of stock in routine.

You are also in love with Karkat Vantas. That too.

The cashiers used to ask you a question when you dumped your basket full of ice cream onto the conveyor belt. Something along the lines of, “Must be having a party, huh?” with all the appropriate amounts of retail-flavored amicability. Their reward was an appropriate amount of Ampora-flavored glower. And so they sort of shut their traps and got on with it, until the day you pitched a fit when there had only been ten pints of Chubby Hubby in the grocery store freezer instead of twelve.

So now when you upend your basket of ice cream in front of them, the cashier gives you a reproachful look and asks, “Got all twelve?”

You reply with an affirmative tonight because yes, yes there are indeed twelve pints of Chubby Hubby sitting proudly before you. And yes, there is also a container of Half Baked, and that one is for you, because it wouldn’t be an ice cream night if only one person was partaking in ice cream.

One white-knuckle drive over the ice-crusted January roads later, you are standing in front of the apartment building complex just sitting kitty-corner to the bank. You peel off your mittens to jab your thumb at the call button with the number 62 next to it. One, two, three beats is all it takes before his voice is crackling through the speaker with all the usual notes of Bad Day. “Get your ass up here.” Then the door unlocks and you push your way into the building accompanied by the crinkle of supermarket plastic bags.

He lives about three floors up, but all your years crawling up to the Peixes penthouse have steeled your calves for the trek, so you are all cool, windswept Ampora by the time he opens the door. You even cock your brow in a way that you know makes you look positively jaunty, but Karkat is already grabbing the bags out of your hands and scuttling back to the kitchen.

“You beautiful bastard,” he breathes as he dumps a bag next to his sink and four pints of Chubby Hubby come rolling out. You try not to take him seriously, just as you try to pass off the pink in your cheeks as windburns.

Maybe you’ll just keep your scarf pulled up over your nose for a while.

Karkat’s shorter than you, always has been, but the extra tousle in his hair has added a few inches today. You know something’s up when there’s extra tousle. Because though Karkat’s hair is never a sculpted masterpiece, he has a tendency to grab it in both fists and make it decidedly less so when he’s upset about something. As he opens his freezer to begin stuffing it full of eleven ice cream containers, you notice that he’s also in sweatpants and that one Good Charlotte T-shirt he still has from seventh grade. A shadow of stubble has begun growing on just the edge of his jaw line too. He never could get a proper beard to grow, not even that one time when he’d been hell bent on winning that bet with Sollux. No amount of exfoliation or any of your other tried and true skin care methods could coax hair from Karkat’s cheeks. They remained adamantly smooth. Kissable even.

No, dammit. No. You blink a few times and remind yourself how grimy he is, how he’s definitely got an unwashed smell to him, how there’s at least twenty grease splotches adorning the fashion abomination he calls his “shame shirt,” and not to mention the deodorant stains. Karkat Vantas is actually disgusting, and even moreso when he’s upset.

You just want to kiss him.

He pulls the top off a container of Chubby Hubby—one of the two that he will likely be eating tonight, the rest slated to be systematically demolished throughout the course of the next week. He then yanks open a drawer and sticks one spoon in his ice cream before handing another to you.

“It’s a _Hitch_ night tonight,” he announces as you pluck the utensil from his hand, the big amethyst on your forefinger glittering under the yellow light of his shitty kitchen bulbs.

“It was a _Hitch_ night last time,” you whine.

“I’m in the mood for having the existence of romantic logic confirmed.”

“Romantic logic is a heap a steamin’ rubbish and you know it, Kar, even Will Smith debunks it at the end.”

He whips his spoon out at you threateningly and a little dab of vanilla dribbles off the end. “If that movie teaches you anything, it’s that the act of being in love clouds your judgment. Having Will Smith fall in love and _then_ debunk his theory is just providing more evidence to that notion. Romantic logic only works if you’re an impassive third party, and that’s what he was to people.”

“What you want to be,” you muse, carefully, because you know you’ve just stepped on an eggshell, and you might have heard it crack.

You stick your spoon in your mouth.

“Of course,” he replies after a beat before shuffling out of the kitchen and into the living room. He drops into the couch and you settle yourself next to him as he reaches for the remote and flips the TV on. Of course the disc is already in the player, because it’s not as if you have an actual say in what movies you get to watch on Ice Cream Night.

Will Smith starts with his narration, listing off the tenets of what Karkat has dubbed Romantic Logic. You look away from the montage you’ve seen at least sixty times by now to peer over at the boy sitting next to you. To watch how he mouths the words over a spoonful of ice cream hovering just below his lips. How he’s glaring at the TV with that intense black gaze that never softens or wavers. And after so many times watching _Hitch_ , you can’t even fault the movie for being what it is, if it makes Karkat look like that. Intense and focused—like all the weight of the world is centered squarely on his shoulders, and instead of letting it cripple him, he forces the pressure out through his eyes.

You lift a hand on tug on his ear gently. “Kar.”

He bats you away without even looking, but some of the intensity has softened.

You love being able to do that.

Mostly because it’s all you really _can_ do.

He murmurs the last tenet along with Will Smith. “Basic principles: no matter what, no matter when, no matter who... any man has a chance to sweep any woman off her feet. He just needs the right broom.”

You sort of hate Will Smith.

Because he neglects to factor boulders into the equation.

Some people cling to life loosely. Like leaves. They like being whipped around. Being swept up by romantic brooms or whatever the fuck. But Karkat Vantas is not that person. He has an iron grip on life and every time some broom comes along, he just clenches down harder. A boulder stuck fast on the edge of a cliff. And as precarious as he looks sometimes, you know a broom isn’t going to dislodge him.

You’ve watched other people bat at him. Watched it confuse him. Frustrate him. Make him angry. And ultimately clench down harder.

There’s nothing about him that wants sweeping. So you’ve sort of kept your own shitty broom in the closet because if anything is going to topple Karkat Vantas over the ledge of Romantic Logic and into the real goddamned thing, it’s going to be some Grade A earthmover.

You don’t have a Grade A earthmover. You have a car and a credit card and a pint of Half Baked. You have Ice Cream Night.

You tug him toward you and he rests his head on your shoulder. “Want me to get the blanket?” he asks.

“Nah,” you reply, carding your fingers through his hair absently. He bristled like a cat the first time you did it, but now he just begrudgingly allows it. Because as unwashed and dingy as his tousled black hair is, there’s a certain scent to it. That warm, musky, unwashed scent that makes you feel dizzy. You scratch a thumb above his temple and he sighs with his whole body.

“Why are we havin’ Ice Cream Night, Kar?” you ask, lifting your hand to begin digging in your ice cream with your spoon.

“Life continues to disappoint me,” he replies. He finishes off the last of his ice cream before setting the empty container on the ground and shifting around until his head is on your lap. You let out a breath of laughter at the way your fingers have made his hair stick out to one side like he’d been caught in a gale-force wind, and he scowls at you. So you apologize by digging out some cookie dough chunks from your ice cream—like you always do, like he expects you to—and putting your spoon to his mouth. He covers the metal with his lips and you listen to the way he slurps a little as you pull it out. Then he closes his eyes and chews. And you just watch, your heart in your throat. You watch the boy you love eating ice cream with the intensity he watches _Hitch_ and makes up bullshit theories and does just about everything.

“Kar,” you say again, hoping the syllable isn’t as strangled as it sounds.

He opens his mouth again.

You only get Half Baked because then at least you can enjoy some chocolate after you’ve given Karkat all your cookie dough pieces. Because as much as you used to enjoy your cookie dough ice cream, you enjoy the way he makes disgusting slurp noises on your spoon even more. The way he lays his head on your lap and looks up at you expectantly.

You feed him some more.

He chews again, intensely, before opening his eyes and saying in a breath, “It’s just hard to live by.”

“What is?” you ask, spooning him some more cookie dough. Because his voice has dipped an octave, into the range you know is reserved only for a special kind of dejected hopelessness, and you just want him to chew on some more sweet things.

He does, and he sighs through his nose.

“Romantic Logic,” he says at last.

“Somethin’ happen?”

“Sort of? I don’t know. More like a lack of things happening. I don’t know.”

“Kar, you do realize that _Hitch_ is a fake made-up heap a BS, right?”

He puts his hands over his eyes. “But the basic principles should be there. If you follow certain rules and emit certain signals, shit should just fucking happen. There should be some goddamned order to this, is what I’m saying.”

“The endin’,” you remind him gently.

“Fuck the ending. We’ve beaten that metaphorical horse to death and I’ve come out on top holding the bigger stick every time.”

You wish you could tell him about boulders. But you don’t. Because there are certain things you don’t think he has in him to believe. You put your spoon in your mouth and he glowers at you. So you pull it out again and continue fishing in your pint for cookie dough.

“I’m just trying to say that, theoretically, if you do certain things, you should make people privy to where you stand with them. It shouldn’t be some fucking drunk gymnast at the Olympics taking these artful fucking leaps at the rings only to miss them entirely and fall on their face. This is the Olympics, you trained your whole life for this shit, it should happen like it’s supposed to.”

Your heart feels swollen in your chest, and every time it beats you can feel it bruise. And bleed. You search more earnestly for a piece of cookie dough.

“Stop digging in your ice cream and talk to me. I can’t believe you don’t have anything to say, you never don’t have anything to say.”

You realize that maybe you’ve fed him all the cookie dough you had. You stare at your spoon inside the chocolatey-vanilla swirled mess and you feel the tightness in your heart work its way into your throat. You think about the useless dusty broom tucked away in your closet and about the boulder of a boy in your lap.

“Maybe you should stop livin’ theoretically,” you say.

It comes out with more vehemence than you intended. Karkat blinks. His brown cheeks flush cinnabar and he sets his jaw.

“Fuck you.”

If you were ever going to reply, you don’t know. Because suddenly your thoughts are wiped away by his hands reaching up for your face and then you’re being pulled down, down close to him, and you can smell the sugar on his breath and— _where the fuck are you supposed to put your ice cream_ —you can taste the cookie dough he’s eaten—taste it because those are his lips on yours, warm and chapped and half open because what the fuck is he supposed to do with them—what are _you_ supposed to do—and your heart is in your ears now, in your head, and you feel dizzy with the roar of it.

He lets you go.

You reel back, dark spots pulsing over your eyes, and you wonder if you might faint. Or wake up. But you do neither of those things, and you watch as if from very far away as Karkat picks at his shirt.

“You spilled ice cream on me, asshole.”

Every part of you is shivering.

“Kar.”

He looks away, over at the TV, and the white glare of the screen dances over his features, making his frown look especially dark.

“Why do you give me your cookie dough?”

You feel like someone has attached nodes to your chest and passed an electric current through your body. Every hair is on end. You can’t unstick your jaw.

The cinnabar tinge on his cheeks deepens. “Any asshole could tell you that the cookie dough is the best part, so why give it to me? All I do is harass you and chase you to grocery stores and make you watch shitty movies. I mean, I like _Hitch_ , but even I can admit that on an objective scale it’s only about sub-par as far as romcoms go.”

“Kar.”

He looks up at you again, and his eyes look as wobbly around the edges as your voice sounds.

“Put your ice cream down this time, asshole.”

Your hands are shaking, but you manage to set it on the floor before he has his hands on both sides of your face again and his fingertips are like tiny beads of warmth stoking the fire in your chest, and you ache with the way his lips feel against yours. And you open your mouth, maybe before he’s ready—maybe before you are—but you do it because you need to be full with him. To taste the peanut butter and cookie dough on his tongue, to feel how cold it is from all the frozen dairy, and you think about his stupid fucking Peep metaphor and you laugh into the kiss, and maybe you’re crying a little too because you keep thinking you’re about to wake up and it keeps not happening.

“You’re a sap,” he whispers as you pull away. His breath is milky-sweet and even as he speaks the words, you can see the tears in his eyes. “An obtuse fucking signal-retarded sap.”

“Shut up,” you reply against his lips, because maybe he’s right, maybe Ice Cream Night has meant as much to him as it always has to you. And suddenly you feel a bit silly but you can’t really care because your fingers are in his hair and he’s looking at you with a sort of fondness like maybe he got knocked off the edge of that cliff a long time ago and you didn’t even need to use your broom. Just a few pints of ice cream and a shitty romcom.

You lean down and kiss him again. And again.

Your ice cream is melted by the time you stop.


End file.
